The second development is the newly launched Google HotPot (official announcement). It's basically a Yelp like service so you know the drill, you can rate Google Places, share with friends, and get recommendations etc.

When you first login, you have to pick a name to associate with your Google Account. The idea here is for privacy reasons you might want to use an alias. I didn't , but you can change it at anytime.

After that you can search for Google Places to rate, or allow it to use your Google Web History to guess what places you would like to rate.

It's quite interesting to look at the places it's suggests you might like to rate based on web history, it got NUS Central library (obviously) and another place (both are not shown above) - which brings back bad memories! You can also of course search for places to rate.

Rating is from 1 star to 5 stars and you can also leave feedback/tips like in FourSquare. You can also give a "best-ever" tag ?? All these ratings (averaged) and feedback/tips are public I believe.

If you rate enough places, you get recommendations and it shows why

You can also add friends, but at this stage not many of my friends have rated places so it is not so interesting in terms of recommendations. I'm so not quite sure how easy or hard it is to add friends, I just selected people from a list given (from prior contacts in gmail??)

Why does Google HotPot make claiming your place page important? This is because ratings as well as comments/tips placed using Google HotPot will appear on your place page, and as you might expect, after claiming you can respond to it.

This isn't new, but reviews also include data drawn from other sources under "Reviews from around the web". For example in Singapore, I see reviews drawn from a service yebber.com.

Below is one example from the Cheng San Community Library in Singapore

You can tell from the date, this isn't a new review. I'm not sure if registering to own the google place allows you to respond to this, or only to comments made by Google Hotpot users.

I suppose this is quite standard Yelp fare, but the fact that these results are shown on Google makes it quite prominent. It's too early to tell, but I have a sense this "social" offering might actually succeed since it seems quite light-weight and easy to use.

It's also available on Android phones of course.

Given that Google Places nows appear in regular Google searches and users are now encouraged to leave comments via Google Hotpot, registering your libraries' place page takes on importance, since you can respond to comments and control the information that appears.

That said it is so early in the "location-wars" and it's unknown who will triumph though logic suggests it is one of the three (FourSquare, Google, FaceBook), or perhaps they might co-exist, so this is definitely going to get interesting..

The second development is the newly launched Google HotPot (official announcement). It's basically a Yelp like service so you know the drill, you can rate Google Places, share with friends, and get recommendations etc.

When you first login, you have to pick a name to associate with your Google Account. The idea here is for privacy reasons you might want to use an alias. I didn't , but you can change it at anytime.

After that you can search for Google Places to rate, or allow it to use your Google Web History to guess what places you would like to rate.

It's quite interesting to look at the places it's suggests you might like to rate based on web history, it got NUS Central library (obviously) and another place (both are not shown above) - which brings back bad memories! You can also of course search for places to rate.

Rating is from 1 star to 5 stars and you can also leave feedback/tips like in FourSquare. You can also give a "best-ever" tag ?? All these ratings (averaged) and feedback/tips are public I believe.

If you rate enough places, you get recommendations and it shows why

You can also add friends, but at this stage not many of my friends have rated places so it is not so interesting in terms of recommendations. I'm so not quite sure how easy or hard it is to add friends, I just selected people from a list given (from prior contacts in gmail??)

Why does Google HotPot make claiming your place page important? This is because ratings as well as comments/tips placed using Google HotPot will appear on your place page, and as you might expect, after claiming you can respond to it.

This isn't new, but reviews also include data drawn from other sources under "Reviews from around the web". For example in Singapore, I see reviews drawn from a service yebber.com.

Below is one example from the Cheng San Community Library in Singapore

You can tell from the date, this isn't a new review. I'm not sure if registering to own the google place allows you to respond to this, or only to comments made by Google Hotpot users.

I suppose this is quite standard Yelp fare, but the fact that these results are shown on Google makes it quite prominent. It's too early to tell, but I have a sense this "social" offering might actually succeed since it seems quite light-weight and easy to use.

It's also available on Android phones of course.

Given that Google Places nows appear in regular Google searches and users are now encouraged to leave comments via Google Hotpot, registering your libraries' place page takes on importance, since you can respond to comments and control the information that appears.

That said it is so early in the "location-wars" and it's unknown who will triumph though logic suggests it is one of the three (FourSquare, Google, FaceBook), or perhaps they might co-exist, so this is definitely going to get interesting..